It's about time!

[Lmns Crn]

...This thread, that is! Which is to say, this thread, is about... hey, you know what, just nevermind.

So I've got a project in mind which is tempting me to break one of the cardinal rules (such as they are) of game design. No time shenanigans. I feel like this is a piece of conventional wisdom that exists for a sound reason-- the more you start to monkey around with cause and effect, the more difficult and confusing things become at the game table, and the easier it becomes to get mired in temporal bullshit--but my goodness it's so tempting to try.

Anyway, I want to use this thread to have a conversation about different ways to Screw with the Flow of Time. Here's my full agenda:
a.) to brainstorm different ways a setting can have "time shenanigans"
b.) to talk about ways these anomalies can be handled during gameplay (not necessarily system-specific, but more in terms of how do you keep track of your complex notes, and how do you run things smoothly at the table)
c.) to hear stories from people who have tried this sort of stuff in-game (and how well it worked, or didn't)
d.) to let you all troubleshoot these ideas while they're still in the planning stages, to identify and address all the headaches these are inevitably going to produce.

Please feel free to contribute to the list, add insight, tear things apart, etc.

[Weave]

I think you should first and foremost nail down what you imagine time being in this setting. Is time one continuous, unbroken stream of forward or backward, or is it something capable of offshoots and parallel streams à la Back to the Future's multiple branching plots? Can a character traveling backwards in time meet their younger selves, or does that asplode the universe?

In any event, I've never tampered with "time shenanigans" for the headaches it can create, but I don't think it's impossible to have a good game involving it. I imagine you could make a game where the players start off by having accidentally triggered some ancient artifact that blows up the world/unleashes ultimate evil and need to go back in time to indirectly stop their previous selves from doing it again, all the while at risk that if their previous selves see them something awful happens in the time stream, further jeopardizing the mission if not ending it entirely, but I'm not sure about allowing multiple time "rollbacks" or forwards as part of a game.

[Lmns Crn]

Travel Through Time
The basic, the classic. Level of complexity varies a great deal: a one-way ticket to the future is a fairly simple fast-forward, but a round-trip ticket to the past can create a lot of unintentional changes in your "home era." Probably the greatest headache involves scenarios of free travel to and fro throughout time, when unrestricted travel to the future and past lets players freely influence any point of the timeline at will. That's a lot more ambitious than I'd feel comfortable attempting, personally.

Communication Through Time
Less potential for mass chaos, I think. One-way communication is simpler. Less remarkable and problematic when sending precedes receiving in the timeline, i.e., receiving messages from the past, sending messages to the future. (This barely counts as time shenanigans, since it can be reproduced with a time capsule. Potentially more interesting when combined with other shenanigans; I've used the idea of messages from the past, but written by meddlesome ancient seers with highly specific recipients and outcomes in mind.) Receiving messages from the future gives players agency to avert a future catastrophe; sending messages to the past can be as catastrophic as actually going there in person to meddle directly.
Related: sending objects forward/backward in time.

[Lmns Crn]

The Problem of Meeting Yourself
It's an iconic danger of time-travel. I've always wanted to run the loop in-game where a player is being meddled-with by an npc shadowy figure (spoiler alert: actually their own future self), then later feels compelled to go back in time and meddle with their own npc past self, recreating the same event from both perspectives, but I can't figure out how to do it without tying player agency into terrible knots.

But that's a main thing I have a problem with in meeting yourself: if when you're 30, you travel back to warn your 22-year-old self not to date Marie (or whatever), wouldn't you have already had been going to have done it? That is to say, doesn't 22-year-old-you already remember having had the conversation, before 30-year-old-you decides to initiate it?

In short, I think whenever you experience the same event from two different temporal perspectives, it's really hard to manage cleanly unless you've set the groundwork in the first scene for the same thing to be revisited again later. Thoughts?

[Lmns Crn]

stuff I still want to address:

- Alternate Timelines
- Prophecy (foreknowledge of future events which still have to happen in the game somehow)
- dimensions where time doesn't flow, or flows at a different speed or in a different direction
- other

[Steerpike]

My Planescape campaign has had time shenanigans, including going back in time or spending a day in Faerie only to discover a month has happened "outside."

At one point a PC kidnapped his previous self, which made for some interesting roleplaying opportunities.  I played quite fast and loose with specific time travel rules on the grounds that Planescape, being all about conflicting beliefs and shifting perceptions, can accommodate multiple time travel methods.  Generally I allowed for changes to the timeline rather than insisting on the Novikov self-consistency principle.

I may also have the PCs meet alternate-timeline and/or future versions of themselves at some point, and I really want to run an adventure using the Demiplane of Time to visit Sigil's far future and/or primordial past.

[Lmns Crn]

At one point a PC kidnapped his previous self, which made for some interesting roleplaying opportunities.

I want to hear this story, I think.

[Ghostman]

If I were to try and handle time travel, I'd do so by making the time traveling characters to become "outsiders" to the universe from the very moment they initiate time travel. They will retain this special outsider status up until the end of their trek through time (by returning to the exact moment where they first set off). As long as they count as outsiders they remain personally unaffected by any changes they might cause to the course of history. Thus, if they were to go back in time and kill their younger selves, they would not disappear -- not before returning to their moment of origin, that is. As a balancing factor it might be necessary to rule that all time travelers have to eventually return and be instantly updated to their revised state in the world, albeit retaining their memories of the time travel.

[Lmns Crn]

An interesting idea, and one with the very practical effect of consolidating all your necessary revisions to one single moment at the end of your jaunt.

[Steerpike]

I want to hear this story, I think.

I don't remember all the specifics but I remember that Modify Memory was involved to wipe the kidnapped past character's mind and at one point the future-version polymorphed himself to avoid freaking his past self out.  I'd ruled that due to the particular time travel method involved the PCs could change things - but then their current selves also changed to reflect those changes.  So, for example, if one's past self got nicked by a blade by one's present self then one's present self would acquire a small scar - the two people are still "linked" as far the multiverse is concerned.

The Lady of Pain also hates chronomancy and time-traveling shenanigans, so this was a great opportunity to menace the PCs with her looming threat.

This all had to do with a crazy soul-powered transplanar device the players used to escape Ravenloft, if I remember correctly.

[Lmns Crn]

One issue I don't want to see lost in the shuffle is prophecy. Even though it's not a "real" instance of time-traveling, it lays down future details out-of-order during play, and so creates some of the same issues of complexity when you're running games.

I know a common way of handling prophecy and omens is the "this is what will happen if the players don't intervene" strategy, where the visions show the consequence of player failure or inaction. This seems unsatisfying to me-- less a prophecy, more a threat-- and often seems flat in the sense that very often, the events foretold do not come to pass at all (because the players averted them).

I am much more interested in prophecy methods where an event or action is foretold and does eventually come to pass, one way or the other. The obstacles here are pretty clear-- again, how to make necessary arrangements without curbstomping player agency-- though I suppose if you have enough grace and finesse, not-totally-rebellious players (hah!), vague prophecies, and a long enough timetable, you can usually work something out. But that's difficult and not always possible.

I'm working with a style of player-useable prophetic magic lately that builds in its own constraints as part of use; these types of oracles would (in terms of mechanics) help to write their own future constraints as part of power activation and (in terms of world fiction, as well as in actual practice during play) gain great future knowledge at the price of their own future options. Effectively, the cost of using the power is that the more you use it, the more you paint your own future behavior into a corner. I still have a lot of tweaking and testing to do with it before I decide whether or not it's a viable option and an acceptable tradeoff. It may turn out not to be.

[Steerpike]

What about competing prophecies?  Maybe multiple prophets see multiple possible futures.  The PCs - and maybe their antagonistic counterparts - could be striving to fulfill the conditions of competing prophecies.

Prophecies could be more like if/then statements than iron-clad predictions.

[Llum]

The way I've always looked at prophecy is that it's like a vine. It grows on a certain path and you know where it's going to end up , but it has to be maintained, trimmed here and there to ensure it reaches the final destination. Unless it's a self fulfilling prophecy (like hearing about it causes it to pass, which could also cause time shenanigans in itself) there are actions of people who have heard it that will make it ether more or less likely to occur.

Different time speeds just screams Zelazny's Amber. The farther into Chaos you are the faster time goes. Haven't really encountered a better or even different way of handling it.

I think the main crux here is to decide if Time Travel (or Time email, or whatever) causes branching timelines. This touches onto alternate timelines in that you have a different set of events that encompass the same timeframe, but are mutually exclusive. Without branching timelines, the way I've always imagined it is that the timeline where someone travels into time stops when that person goes back into time, and then whatever that person changes  continue that same timeline but it creates a different set of events. Then when that person returns to the future, they're skipping ahead, so they arrive at a different future than they left, but at the same point in time.

[Ghostman]

The classical way to handle prophecies is making them sufficiently ambiguous that it becomes difficult to mess with them. Compare the following two examples:

1. "Luke Skywalker will become a jedi and bolster the rebellion against the galactic empire. He will confront Darth Vader, whose final act of betrayal will kill the emperor and ensure the victory of the rebels."

2. "The son of a lost prodigy will follow the path of the warrior and take up the banner of rebellion. He will confront the fallen knight, whose final act of betrayal will bring doom upon his dark master and a boon to his foes."

Both prophecies fortell the same events, but only one of them spells out clearly the what's and the who's involved. The second one is so vague that it could easily be applied to many other stories, while the first one is totally specific.

The greatest advantage to ambiguous prophecies in the context of an RPG is that you never need to explicitly confirm that the PCs are living in the midst of an unfolding prophecy. You can simply call attention to the similarities of their situation with the vague wording of the divination, allowing them to draw their own conclusions. If/when PCs manage to derail the foretold course of events, there's a convenient way out: the prophecy never was about them in the first place, that only seemed to be the case.

[beejazz]

Gotta say I'm a big fan of Groundhog's Day scenarios or branching timelines when bringing this stuff into RPGs. It keeps consistency and player agency issues at bay.

I prefer to keep prophecy vague, put it in "if x then y" format, have it refer to otherworldly events (especially for the "if" trick), or have it refer to something the party really can't so much influence as attempt to weather (say, a comet falling to earth). Usually two or three of those.